Claudia Dreifus is a political journalist whose most recent
Ms. article, "Berlin Diaries," recounted
her trip to Germany to investigate the fate of family members
during the Holocaust. Her most recent book is Scientific
Conversations.

Women on Death Row
A Special Report by Claudia Dreifus

To visit with Brittany Holberg, a
reporter has to apply to the Texas Department of Criminal
Justice, obtain the inmate's permission, and agree
to a dress code that includes no halter tops, no mid
drift [sic] exposure, no low-cut blouses,
etc.

Ms. Holberg on the day we meet is
wearing standard prison whites and is sitting in an
absolutely centered position within a glass and steel
box at a special visitor's center within the women's
prison. Though she is presented like a specimen in
a museum-case, there s something moving about how
Brittany has composed herself. Her hair and make-up
are carefully done; her upright posture bespeaks a
quiet defiance. Amazingly, after hundreds of interviews
with world leaders and film stars, I am struck dumb
by the setting. I've never interviewed a person in
a box before. I find it hard to be talking to an individual
about the conditions of her planned death. She's healthy.
She doesn't have cancer or AIDS. But there's a huge
machine working to scientifically, legally, kill
her.

Brittany is uncomfortable too. She
doesn't know me from Eve, but I'm asking her about
her deepest thoughts and nightmares, while the prison
officials are, no doubt, listening in.

At first we chat-- I swear-- about
the weather, and then, guardedly, about her existence
before death row. Brittany says her parents were hippie-drugsters,
but she doesn t blame them for her fate. She made
a teen-aged marriage and has a beautiful daughter
from that, Mackenzie, now age 10, who lives with her
father in Tulsa.

At 20, Brittany left him, moved back
to her hometown of Amarillo, fell in with a bad crowd,
and got hooked on hard drugs. To support herself and
her habit, she began working in the sex trade. Because
of the appeal, I can't talk about that night, Brittany
whispers, referring to the crime. I wish I could talk
to you about it. I would, I would tell you everything."

The day after her jury came in with
their lethal sentence, Brittany was transported to
the death row at Gatesville: "I can't even explain
to you, she sighs, what it s like to have someone
say, 'you are sentenced to die.' It's words. You feel
helpless, numb. It's almost as if your emotions shut
you down."

For weeks, Brittany lay catatonic
in her cell, staring at the wall, not quite believing
where she'd landed. Eventually, I made myself get
up. I learned how to stop focusing on where I was,
whether it was right or wrong, because all that doesn't
matter. The desire to live was what mattered, not
the reality of her surroundings. "I don't dwell
everyday on the fact that I'm on death row,"
she tells me. "I would go mad if I sat here everyday
and thought to myself, 'The State of Texas wants to
kill me. They want to put a needle in my arm and they
want to kill me.' So I have learned to take every
day one little step at a time."

Having a daughter gave her impetus
to pull herself together. Mackenzie is the reason
I am where I am right now, mentally, Brittany says,
smiling. "I cannot live, and I cannot die, knowing
that my child has to live with the horror that these
people tried to say about me, the story of the crime,
their depiction that I was a cold-blooded person."

Leaving a decent record for Mackenzie,
seeking to be fully present in whatever time she had
left, plus detoxifying from the cocaine, transformed
this woman.

When one meets Brittany Holberg,
she seems difficult to decode. She is muted and, at
the same time, open. Though she is poorly educated,
there is a thoughtfulness to her. It was carelessness
about her very being that landed her in Gatesville,
but today, there's nothing careless about Brittany
Holberg. Brittany spends her days reading, writing
to her family, and working on her appeals. And she
keeps up with the death penalty debate out there in
the free world.